Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett

“ The Liberal, who had hitherto pleaded militancy as an excuse for his antisuffragism, said at the annual meeting of Liberals in his constituency: "Any party which did not realize that the women had made good their cause by their services where they had formerly spoilt it by their threats must be blind"; and he held there should be no widening of the franchise for men without bringing in women on the same terms. The Conservative said simply: "I have always been an antisuffragist, but the women have served their country so magnificently that after this I shall support giving them the vote." ”

“ The war revolutionized the industrial position of women. It found them serfs and left them free. It not only opened to them opportunities of employment in a number of skilled trades, but, more important even than this, it revolutionized men's minds and their conception of the sort of work of which the ordinary everyday woman was capable. It opened men's eyes to the national waste involved in condemning women to forms of work needing only very mediocre intelligence. ”

“ War even illuminates the abstruse and difficult subject of foreign exchanges, and shows that no nation grows rich by printing promises to pay on pieces of paper. War also teaches the supreme national value of life, and illuminates Ruskin's saying, "There is no wealth but life." It is a realization of this which has fundamentally raised the position of women in every country which has come within the radius of its great searchlights. ”

“ Equality before the law is a hundred times more stable guarantee for justice than favouritism. Women over and over again have said they are not out for privilege, but for equality of opportunity. Major Hills, who was in charge of the amendments to the Bill promoted by the women's societies, said with brutal frankness that the meaning of the clauses promoted by the Government was "that all the higher-paid posts in the Civil Service will continue to be reserved to men." ”

“ While out-of-work distress lasted among women, we opened, in various parts of the country, forty workshops, and gave employment to over 2,000 women. I well remember the resentment and melancholy of some able young women in our employment when they saw the advertisements everywhere displayed calling upon young men to join the colours, announcing in huge letters Your Country wants You, and reflected that their country did not want them. We endeavoured, so far as lay in our power, to check this feeling of discontent by not diminishing our own demand for the services of women. ”

“ Party discipline and party passion had always been inimical to our movement. "Yes, I am your friend, but I am not prepared to break up my party in order to support you," said one party leader. "Yes, I am your friend, but I tell you frankly, you must not count on my vote if the success of women's suffrage would mean the withdrawal from public life of my leader, Mr. Asquith," said another. I had been accustomed to say of the two chief parties, Liberal and Conservative, that from the suffrage point of view the first was an army without generals, and the second was generals without an army. ”

“ I wish to dedicate this little book to the thousands of faithful friends and gallant comrades whose brave unwearied work, steadfastly maintained through many years, made Women's Suffrage in Great Britain no longer a dream but a reality. ”

“ Another writer, probably male, not to be left behind in offensive rubbish, wrote in the Liverpool Courier: "Votes for women! Why, the matter is in a nutshell. If married, she exercises the franchise through her husband. If a widow, she is a past-partner in a joint concern, and should rest content with the achievement of other days. If single, she is, or ought to be, too busily engaged in trying to capture 'John Henry Charles' to think about votes." Degrading and vulgar nonsense of this kind was nauseating to every decent-minded man or woman, whether for or against suffrage ”

“ The moral for us was that if our legislators could so little read the signs of the times in regard to a comparatively simple matter like the development of motor transport, it was not astonishing that they were at least as incapable of reading the signs of the times in regard to a great human movement which was gradually, in almost every part of the world, raising the position of women from absolute subjection to free citizenship. ”

“ In the second, and far shorter, period, of less than two years—February, 1918, to November, 1919—we find seven Acts of value and importance slipping through Parliament without any trouble at all; ministerial swords leaping from their scabbards to remove impediments from the path of the free citizenship of women. ”

“ Suffragists are not labouring under the impression that because women now have votes no further reform is needed in our representative system. A large proportion of suffragists are probably in favour of proportional representation, and would favour its adoption mainly on the ground that it would secure a much fairer reflection of the whole nation than the present system, which may, and frequently does, result in the practical exclusion from representation of large masses of the voters. ”

“ In the midst of this time of terrible anxiety and grief, it is some little comfort to think that our large organization, which has been carefully built up during past years to promote women's suffrage, can be used now to help our country through this period of strain and sorrow. ”

“ This, as we did not fail to point out, illustrated the value of a vote: voters could get what they wanted without even asking for it; whereas the voteless had to devote years and generations, and to spend thousands of pounds, in order to voice persistent demands on the part of women for representation, demands which were as persistently and determinedly passed by unnoticed, and we were asked why we did not hold a few meetings! ”

“ Among the speeches on our side Lord Lytton's rose to the level of the very highest excellence. The House, so proverbially difficult to move in any emotional sense, was obviously and deeply moved by his earnestness, transparent sincerity, and closely reasoned argument. Gossip said that as he concluded Lord Curzon threw himself back in his seat and exclaimed, sotto voce, to his next neighbour: "What a tragedy that such talent should be wasted upon women!" ”

“ Liberals all over the country were quite willing to endorse John Bright's wise saying, "Force is no remedy"; but they seemed absolutely incapable of finding the real remedy—the extension to women of free institutions. Mr. Asquith had proclaimed that the object of his Government was "to set upon an unshakable foundation the principles of Representative Government," while maintaining that its application to women would be a political mistake of a disastrous nature. ”

“ But it is impossible to imagine that a Parliament elected by women would have allowed the maternity benefit to be paid to the husband, and would have given the woman the remedy of prosecuting the man, with whom she must continue to live, if he does not spend it properly. ”

“ Lastly, we are demanding the opening of the legal professions to women. We wish to enable women to become solicitors, barristers, and magistrates.
The walls of our Jericho have not fallen at the first blast of our trumpet, but we have made great progress in promoting the principle of equal pay for equal work, and with the familiarizing of the British public with women as candidates for Parliament. Since the General Election two or three women have been candidates, and one, Lady Astor, has been returned by an immense majority. ”

“ But we began to be aware of a new note among the voices that go to make up public opinion when we discovered commercial and financial magnates, managers of railways and other great industrial concerns, and old-fashioned country gentlemen not hitherto connected in any way with our political aims, joining in the chorus which was now loudly chanting the praises of women's work. ”

“ In the early summer of 1913 an incident occurred which deeply touched the popular imagination, and placed the principle of self-sacrifice as illustrated by the militants on a hill-top from which it was seen not only all over our own country, but throughout the world. Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied. ”

“ The widow of a soldier, and sister of General French, she had lived most of her life among military people and in a military atmosphere. She was the life and soul of the suffrage movement in Shrewsbury and the neighbourhood, where her fine character has left a lasting impression. In December, 1914, she joined the first unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for foreign service under Dr. Elsie Inglis, and acted as administrator of the great hospital, afterwards so famous, which was opened in the Abbaye de Royaumont. Mrs. Harley took her young daughter with her as one of her orderlies. ”

“ What is more—and this is a point which makes a special appeal to me—they say, when the war comes to an end, and when these abnormal, and of course to a large extent transient, conditions have to be revised, and when the process of industrial reconstruction has to be set on foot, have not the women a special claim to be heard on the many questions which will arise directly affecting their interests, and possibly meaning for them large displacements of labour? ”

“ We demand equal pay for equal work. And we demand an open field for women in industrial and professional work.
2. We demand the immediate reform of the divorce law and the laws dealing with solicitation and prostitution. An equal moral standard must be established.
3. The Government is in favour of widows' pensions in principle. By constant pressure we mean to make the House of Commons turn principle into practice. We demand pensions for civilian widows. ”

“ One main objection of the antisuffragists to our enfranchisement was that the number of women in this country was about one and a half million in excess of the number of men. It was therefore plausible, although fallacious, to say that women's suffrage would result in making over the government of the country to women. ”

“ Opposition from a Liberal, with all the Liberal traditions of devotion to the principles of representative government and a wide suffrage, was far more damaging to our cause than opposition from Conservatives. It was Mr. Asquith, more [14] than any other one person, who prevented the Liberal Party becoming a Reform Party, and including women in their general scheme of enfranchisement. In 1906, very shortly after the unprecedented Liberal triumph of that year, the Liberals returned were by an immense majority supporters of the enfranchisement of women. ”

“ The Government and the country were therefore, in the third year of the war, face to face with the impossible position that if circumstances necessitated an appeal to the country there was in existence no register of voters which could in any sense be looked upon as representative of the manhood of the nation. ”

“ That a woman was capable of throwing away her life on the chance that it might serve the cause of freedom might have taught him to expect what happened about fourteen months later, when over 5,000,000 young Englishmen voluntarily joined the army in order to preserve the principles of liberty and self-government throughout the world. ”

“ In a certain screwing operation it was customary before the employment of women to rough the thread out with the tool, and then to finish it off with taps. Some trouble having arisen owing to the wearing of the taps, the women of their own initiative did away with the second operation, and are now accurately chasing out the threads to gauge with the tool alone. This is work of which any mechanic might feel proud.... In fact, it may be stated with absolute truth that women have shown themselves perfectly capable of performing operations which have hitherto been exclusively carried out by men. ”

“ Lloyd George had told us, the Reform Bill was not a Government but a House of Commons Bill. Then there was Lord Bryce, from some points of view an even more formidable opponent, with all his prestige as an historian and a successful diplomatist. Lord Balfour of Burleigh was another redoubtable antagonist. We were told no man in the Upper House had more influence upon the predominant party [149] in it. ”

“ The Treasury, on its part, gave a solemn promise not to use women as a reservoir of cheap labour, and agreed to give the same wages for the same output, and, moreover, to restore by Act of Parliament when the war was over the pre-war practices of trade unions, which had severely limited the employment of women. ”

“ The last four years had witnessed the steady advance of the suffrage cause. It was now in the forefront of practical politics, and was a question which had led to more than one serious Cabinet crisis, and was capable of making or unmaking Governments. We held steadfastly to our resolution to work for nothing in Parliament but a Government measure backed by a united Cabinet. ”

“ Finally, I urged him not to shut his eyes to the fact that the women's demand to share in self-government was a vital and living movement, a development of the basic principle of democracy, and was founded on the growth of education and the wider industrial and professional opportunities which women had won for themselves during the last two generations. ”